She was five. I met her a week ago. There was a small red chair in the hospital TV room, it was hers. It wasn’t red when she arrived, but she could see that it wanted to be. It took twenty-two boxes of crayons but that didn’t matter, she could afford it, everyone here gave her crayons all the time. As though she could draw away her illness, color away the needles and the drugs. She knew that wasn’t possible, of course, she was a smart kid, but she pretended for their sakes. So she spent her days drawing on paper, because it made all the adults happy. And at night, she colored in the chair.
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